Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What is the best way to go about building backlinks?
-
I'm a newbie here and my head is spinning because I don't know where or how to start the backlink building process. My website is 1 month old and I don't have any backlinks yet. what is the best way to go about it? Should I study my competition's backlinks and go from there? I'm so confused I need help! Please help! Any information will be greatly appreciated!!
-
-
When talking about waste removal I guess it depends on the audience. If the website is for commercial clients, you could talk about the advantages of using this service. Look for any added value like:
- Tax Deductible benefits
- Recycling certification which can make clients more desirable
- Proper disposal of hazardous waste
- Educating clients
- How Brazil is using waste to power Rio
- Tech developments in the industry
- Sustainability and your clients
- Here is a link to 35 medical waste and disposal blogs
I agree that waste disposal is not a very captivating concept but if you can spin it to something that could be advantageous to business owners (waste companies clients).
All this is for content creation on a waste removal website but for backlinks you would need to reach out to webmasters whose readers would benefit from the content on your site.
-
Please private message me with your domain and I can give you more specific help. Thanks again and best of luck to you.
-
Welcome, don't worry most of our heads are spinning most of the time.
My favorite approach is to look at competitors backlinks like you said, use:
- Moz open site explorer
- Alexa chrome app - go to backlinks section - must pay to view all - 10 dollar subscription
- Ahref
- google search query "links exampledomain.com" to view all links to a domain.
- similar web for referring sites
- Spyfu
- WordStream
- Semrush
- many many more
When viewing blogs in your nich often times the commenters name will hyperlink to their site and sometimes its followed. Comment a lot and start a disqus account to track engagement to come back to started conversations.
Start an account on quora, stackexachnge (many communities and for sure one or more for your niche whatever it is), reddit account, other forums.
Start posting on social media 20/80 - 80 % to build authority promoting other influencers stuff and 20 percent your content - after a while your truely good content will get promoted by your network for the viral effect - To find out more about online marketing be sure to check out my Digital Marketing blog called Digital Marketing Skills
Please leave a comment or two and please thumbs up this post if you found anything here useful.
Overall three prong approach to backlinking:
- Create link worthy content
- Be active in the online community - comment on blogs, answer questions on forums, and share on social media
- Link out to reputable website on your website
-
Hi Dana,
Thank You so much for the two links you gave me, I'm going to start reading right away! Backlinks are the one stumbling block that keeps tripping me up as I'm sure it is for most newbies. I want to get my link building campaign going and I think the info you gave me is going to steer me in the right direction!!
I appreciate the info!!
Thank You,
Theresa
-
You can add me to that short list of Howdy Doody aquaintences.
-
In my opinion, the author of this type of content should know enough about the industry that he/she can easily identify (or immediately knows)
-- the public misconceptions (these often will be very interesting to people)
-- what people need to know that they usually don't know (this surprises them and is very sharable)
-- the "hot button" issues (plenty of these about waste and they can go viral)
If the author does not know these types of things about the industry then he/she is the wrong author or he/she needs to do a lot of learning. There are a lot of topics in this industry that can get venomous. Lots more that are very touchy. All of them must be 100% technically correct when there is a lot of misinformation about this topic out there.
I'd talk with the client about this and be prepared to say that I am not the right person for this content job.
-
"Howdy Doody"
Ha ha... I thought that Robert Fisher and I would be the only people posting here who know about "Howdy Doody".
Thanks for the laugh.
-
Wow! Thats a rough one. I thought the incredibly exciting niche of paper shredding was hard Well, I would be interested to know about some of the crazy stories of some of the guys picking up and dumping the trash. Have they ever found anything cool? Anything illegal? That type of thing.
You could compare pricing for a geographic region that you service and make it very graphic heavy. For example where we are some municipalities make you use their dumpsters. Others there are multiple companies all vying for business. You could get the data on the different prices for the different dumpster sizes across all the companies and municipalities in your region and do a mini graphic to accompany a blog post about that. Then you could contact all your typical customers and let them know about this handy reference. This would be good especially if your client was the lower price or has some other unique selling propostion since it would be good for his business.
I know that isn't earth shattering, but there is always a fun way to put a spin on a boring niche. I am sure others will have good ideas too
-
Hi Lisa,
I would argue that rubbish and waste can be completely fascinating to a certain audience...my boys for example, who are ages 14 and 10. They are completely amused by anything having to do with...welll..you know...
I recently saw a billboard here in town for a septic tank company that used the headline "Howdy Doody"
Yeah. I thought it was funny, but my boys thought it was hilarious. So hilarious that they kept talking about it for weeks. Guess who I called when I needed my septic tank cleaned out?
Need I say more? lol
Dana
-
Hi Joshua
I love your answer - I feel that good content should get links automatically. But im stuck, for example I am trying to increase links for a waste management company - they remove commercial rubbish! So it is not glamorous.
I feel stuck - what do I write about that people would think was excellent when it is to do with waste?! And also that the client is happy to have on his website.
I am wondering what the best approach is when you have a really boring topic e.g. rubbish removal - how do you get more links if all the content is about a mundane topic like waste removal?Any insight you can give would be appreciated.
thanks so much
Lisa
-
Theresa,
There was a recent blog post here on SEOmoz that addressed the best types of content to write about and post on your website in order to get links coming naturally to that piece of excellent content. It was this post here: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/7-content-archetypes-that-generate-natural-links. I would recommend that if your website has a blog setup on it that you try to find something that your passionate, excited, and super revved up about to write about. The make it really good. There was also recently a whiteboard friday done by the folks over at vertical measures that explains what the content needs to contain to rank well. It was a very cool study that you might enjoy: http://www.verticalmeasures.com/vm-news/we-cracked-the-content-code-whiteboard-friday/. There is no magic pill or potion to getting backlinks, but if you write from your heart on informative topics that are what your website is about and then share the fact that you wrote something great with people on social media and other leaders in your space you will start to get links. I hope this helps you. Best wishes!
-
Hi Theresa, First let me say, welcome to the best SEO community in the world. There are so many ways to build backlinks, that yes, if you read all the posts here, it will make your head spin. So, let me give you a link to the Mother of all link-building blog posts. I have this bookmarked and every time I feel "stuck" I go right back to it because I always find some new idea every time I read it.
http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies
I guarantee you, you'll bookmark this and go back to it over and over andover and still never exhaust all the possibilities. Hands down, the best, most complete list of strategies ever. Now, I'm not saying there isn't stuff missing off this list. I'm just saying, if you completely exhaust this list, you're going to have one kick ass link profile!!!
Hint - Investigate Tynt.com first....a fascinating link-building tool. Free. Easy to use. Yes, it's on the list.
Hope this helps!
Dana
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
All backlinks not showing on my website
hey folks, i am fairly new to SEO and i have noticed that i have backlinks that tools like ubersuggest or SEM rush are nothshowing my product is lazyapply.com. -> It's an automated job search application can anyone suggest me what should id do ? PS - for example i have backlink from crunchbase.com but my website is not showing me that
Link Building | | viveklazy0 -
Backlinks and SPAM
I was doing some back link review of competitors and I have noticed that many of our competition have 300+ do follow back links from Justia.com and an additional 300+ do follow links from law.cornell.edu (they share the same database). The links on Justia are from different pages and they are all going to the root of our competitors site. So the questions are as follows; 1: For the purpose of SEO is this considered SPAM 2: If not SPAM, then does it have a positive effect on the competitions website and should I attempt to emulate for my client. Thanks in advance. -Jeff
Link Building | | FriedmanSimon10000 -
India link building - any good ?
Hi Everyone We have clients that have very small budgets. We thought about outsourcing our link building to India to help with costs... Can anyone recommend any good Indian Link building companies that are well priced and that you have seen good results from ?? Any help would be much appreciated Thanks Guys Gareth
Link Building | | GAZ090 -
PR1 and PR2 backlinks
We're doing some content marketing. I've heard that it is a good idea to target even PR1 and PR2 sites (small DA sites). I'm concerned about these sites disappearing after a few months, as we've found that losing a backlink can sting a bit and be worse than never having it. Though this isn't as big a deal any more. Anyways, can somebody say when a PR1/PR2 backlink would be appropriate to go after? Some of them would be easy and if it's appropriate I'd like to include them. So far they would only pass our standards if they are Above PR0 Look like a white hat, quality site from the outside Have a clean backlink profile Look like they're going to stick around Successful Social Media Accounts a plus What are you guys' criteria for including these sites? Do you gain value from them?
Link Building | | BobGW0 -
How to get BackLinks?
What is the best site to get backlinks ? Not for free, i mean a paid premium services . I think i need backlinks for the authority of my sites. My sites are indexed, but when i search for different keywords on google, i find them on page 5-7 . I need to see them on page 1-2 . But my site's authority is : 1 .
Link Building | | vende123450 -
Why do we need proxy to so Backlinks?
Does Google knows the IP addresses that the backlinks are created from? if i create 200 backlinks for my site without proxies will google ban my site because it will look like i a the one who create all the backlinks? May i ask how many proxies do you guys need to create around 200 backlinks per day? If i already use the proxies today Can i use the same set of proxies to create backlinks tomorrow? THanks
Link Building | | locoto00071 -
Is there a way to Rank above wikipedia?
Is there a way to Rank above wikipedia? Please share any strategies.. Thanks
Link Building | | DmitryP0 -
What is the best way to manage backlinks?
What back link management software do you guys use or recommend? Need to manage types of links on each page. Thanks
Link Building | | joemas990